Free Software Foundation (FSF) grants two annual awards. Since 1998, FSF has granted the award for Advancement of Free Software. Since 2005, it has also granted the Free Software Award for Projects of Social Benefit.

This is annually presented by the Free Software Foundation (FSF) to a person whom it deems to have made a great contribution to the progress and development of free software, through activities that accord with the spirit of free software.[1]

Additionally, a special mention was made to honor the memory and contribution of Adrian Hands, who used a morse input device to code and successfully submit a gnome patch, three days before he died from ALS.[7]

for his campaigning against binary blobs, and the opening of drivers, documentation and firmware of wireless networking cards for the good of everyone. The other finalists were Andrew Tridgell for Samba and Cesar Brod for advocacy in Brazil.[13]

for his work advocating the importance of software freedom, his outspoken opposition to the USA's DMCA as well as other technology control measures, and his development work on the Linux kernel. The other finalists were Theo de Raadt for OpenBSD and Werner Koch for GnuPG.[14]

The Free Software Award for Projects of Social Benefit is an annual award granted by the Free Software Foundation (FSF). In announcing the award, the FSF explained that:

This award is presented to the project or team responsible for applying free software, or the ideas of the free software movement, in a project that intentionally and significantly benefits society in other aspects of life.[20]

According to Richard Stallman, President of FSF, the award was inspired by the Sahana project which was developed, and was used, for organising the transfer of aid to tsunami victims in Sri Lanka after the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake. The developers indicated that they hope to adapt it to aid for other future disasters.[21]

"A free software medical record system for developing countries. OpenMRS is now in use around the world, including South Africa, Kenya, Rwanda, Lesotho, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Uganda, Tanzania, Haiti, India, China, United States, Pakistan, the Philippines, and many other places."[4][5]

"[For] foster[ing] a growing body of creative, educational and scientific works that can be shared and built upon by others [and] work[ing] to raise awareness of the harm inflicted by increasingly restrictive copyright regimes."[9]